


Quite Infuriating

by oonaseckar



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types, James Bond - Ian Fleming
Genre: British Telly, Countdown, Eight Out of Ten Cats Does Countdown, Game Shows, Gen, M/M, Quiz Shows, Secret Hideaway, Talk Shows, panel shows, q.i., sandi toksvig - Freeform, secret life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26677726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: Bond has a secret life.  It involves a lot of teatime telly, and a beer fridge.
Relationships: James Bond & Q, James Bond/Q
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	1. i'll have a Q please, Bob

Bond has a secret life. It doesn't involve chokingly dry cocktails and pneumatic lovelies.

Sometimes he gets back from a mission and he's just fed up, fucking _fed to the back teeth._ With the job, with the mission, with M and Moneypenny and the generals and the top brass. With NHS GP receptionists who think they're fucking _medical professionals_ and the Archers and Jeremy Kyle. With home and beauty and the defence of the free, with Brexit, with Gary sodding Barlow and cricket and patriotism and little Queenie Windsor and with, well, _England_.

And in that mood he turns, counter-intuitively, to the _best_ of England, to bring him back around, and put the Union Jack back on his boxers.

That, that is why, six p.m. on a rainy Thursday evening in May, he can be found, here and now, in a little hush-hush hidey-hole he keeps in North London. _Hush-hush,_ don't tell the other agents, they'll all want one. Nothing fancy, council/private provider redbrick and plywood, single bed studio. Sky piped in, and a fridge big enough for four beers and a pack of mint YoYos on his bedside cabinet. He's sitting on the bed in order to watch the telly: _that's_ how big the place is, and it's cosy, like a burrow. Makes him feel a bit of a Hobbit. Nothing wrong with that. Handsome sturdy stout-hearted chaps, staunch in their defence of the Shire. In their place he might have cottoned on a bit quicker to that Saruman the White chappie, that's all he's saying. Give the swine a blast with a rocket-launcher, send him flying all the way to Mordor, see how he feels about the dark side then, eh?

Bond settles back against the wall, cracks open the first Stella. He fantasises a bit sometimes, about being an unemployed divorced loser with a couple of kids he barely sees, a ticket to the council gym and _no sodding responsibilities whatsoever._ It's a beautiful dream. 

And he waits for his current favourite moment in these brief interludes: the Eggheads theme tune.

Oh, okay, Q.I. may reign supreme in all of British light entertainment. If Sandy Toksvig was appointed as M, he would kneel and kiss the ring like a shot, like a ruddy _shot_. (He rather worships Toksvig. Mostly Danish, a little bit American, all lady-lover, and the supreme British national treasure. Yep, Bond has a bit of a _thing_.)

_Q.I_.: top rank. _Countdown_ , maybe his all-time fave. (And the _Eight Out of Ten Cats_ move, that was playing a blinder.)

But for sheer cosy, vicious, Mensa-lite mano-a-mano cock-fighting, you can't beat _Eggheads_. Not for Bond's money.


	2. I like frogs...  I like their casual approach to life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is Sandi Toksvig.

Bond sings along, shouts at Jeremy Vine when he appears and goes through the usual intro and banter, nods along to the introduction of the regulars. Ashman, good fella, all the brains and none of the spotlight. Judith, sex on legs, went to Cheltenham Ladies' with M and they _still_ keep in touch. (He has a rather sad dream of being asked along to one of their bi-monthly teas at Betty's in Harrogate, but so far M has turned a deaf ear to his hints.) Barry, absolutely standard trainspotter in appearance and very smart chap, though M has intimated that Daphne says _appearances are deceiving._ Irresistible ladies' man, apparently. One can never tell.

Bond misses C.J. He misses him like _sunshine_. Misses him like the flower misses the bee, like the drones miss all the beeswax from all the product in his magnificently oddball hairdo of the week.

Hughes: restful, melliflous, genial, probably a mad axeman with a secret dungeon on the sly. Still a charming old geezer however. 

And the toxic trifle that is Judith: doesn't every pantomime need an evil queen, every dalmatian require its Cruella?

The old reliables greeted warmly, Bond silently mouthing his chat at them as at old comrades, he settles to, assessing the new combatants, the pretenders to the throne.

And _oh Lord._ What a _shower_. A retired bank manager, absolutely compulsory, yes. Book-keeper and Gilbert and Sullivan society enthusiast, yeeees. Housewife with various volunteer activities and six chihuahuas, of course. Nerdy comp sci grad student, quite. Farmer –- bit of a curveball –- with an interest in anarchist literature and electronic music festivals. --. --. ??

No no _no_. Hold up. Something not quite right here. And it's not the raving anarchist farmer, although what the _eff_.

Bond's gaze switches back to the comp sci guy, and it's not just a double but a triple take, even though he knows, he _knows_. Q. It's Q.


	3. the long answer is FUCK NO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Stephen Fry.

_Why_ is it goddamn Q? What the ever-living ever-loving hell?

(Q does rather well. His team, even more so. Q's performance is unsurprisingly stellar. Although the Young Farmer is also surprisingly scintillating, the one to save the day, catch a couple of curve-balls and take them to a storming victory. It leaves Judith sour-mouthed as a lemon-sucking duck-billed platypus with piles. Bond will rib him about that, when he--. _What the fuck is Q doing on Eggheads?_ )

xxx

They are serendipitously scheduled for an appointment in the morning, a run-through of the itinerary for his next mission (which is extremely imminent.) Bond lets it run its course about halfway, to get Q running smoothly through his paces. Smug little git, absently caught up in the wonders of pyrotechnics and firepower.

'So you see, Bond, I'd be _so_ much obliged, if you'd just try to throttle back on the new model, and not--." The sarcastic emphasis Q places upon that second 'so' is enough for Bond to want to carefully sow landmines amongst the lab-tables and fume cupboards of his little empire. Then, to set him playing _pin the tail on the donkey,_ while fully warned and aware of the hazards of the lethal crazy golf game Bond has set up. Or perhaps _actual_ crazy golf, with the little windmill booby-trapped with a rocket launcher.

But he doesn't. (He never _has_. He deserves a fucking _medal_.) Instead, he says, 'And if I do? Will I get points for the bonus round, or will Jeremy Vine send me off to front up against C.J., eh? Tell me, now: considering how that turnip-sucking sheepshagger wiped the floor with you, how come I'm not taking advice from a quarter-master in green wellies covered in sheepshit, hmm? Up from the Cotswolds, after reporting to Countryfile to the strains of the Archers' theme tune?

Bond does expect to discomfit Q, at least a little. What a _nerd_ , after all. Fielding a team on _Eggheads_. (Eggheads!) The fact that Bond has only stumbled upon this engaging fact by virtue of being an habitual and devoted viewer of...


	4. the slightest push - in just the right place -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from The Tipping Point. Not _that_ Tipping Point.

Oh, of course, he's let himself _right_ in it with this. Should have thought of that aspect before now. Slipping up, man, he mentally chastises himself. Getting _old_. 

Instantly he marshals a dozen manly, sophisticated and _watertight_ reasons why he would have glancingly, just barely caught five –- no, _two_ –- minutes of a quiz show designed for the over... Well, the giddy, the senile, the housebound, the unemployed and the shamelessly addicted, basically. For those too busy muttering inanities in their nursing home corner, bib smeared with tapioca, to yell at the carer to wheel them away from the telly. Or at least switch over to Tenable, or Bargain Hunt.

But he doesn't require them. Q is too downy a one, too sly: he knows exactly where to turn the knife, what will wound Bond the most in his _savoir faire,_ his _amour propre._

Merely, he raises one inky black eyebrow, lid twitching over the lens of his spectacles. That's it, that's all he does. But it speaks about a million words. _I'm onto you,_ it says. I'm _so_ onto you, you are _so_ busted, that I don't even need to speak a word. I know it. You know it. You know I know it. I forever and forever will have _the goods_ on you now, 007.


End file.
